SSH Server

For a VPS, it is recommended that a non-root user with sudo privileges is used instead of root. Therefore, create a new user and add them to the sudo group. Instructions are available in the sudo section on my Linux page. After that’s done, disallow root password login.

Docker

To install the latest version of Docker, add the GPG key for the official Docker Ubuntu repository as a trusted APT repository key.

Docker should now be installed, the daemon started, and the process enabled to start on boot. Check that it’s running.

sudo systemctl status docker

Docker Compose

To get the latest release, install Docker Compose from Docker’s GitHub repository. Visit https://github.com/docker/compose/releases to lookup the version number. Then use curl to output the download to /usr/local/bin/docker-compose. For example,

Config Server Firewall (CSF)

Config Server Firewall contains a straight forward easy to understand configuration file. CSF also comes with a Login Failure Daemon that will alert you of large scale login attempts on ssh, mail and other servers. CSF also allows you to whitelist or blacklist IP addresses aside from the LFD real time monitoring and automatic IP blocking.

Disable the default firewall service.

sudo ufw disable

Since CSF is currently not available in the Ubuntu repositories, download it from the ConfigServer’s website into the home directory.